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There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
A man in not educated because he talks much; the learned man is he who is patient, free from hatred and fear.
Mental superiority of any kind always tends to isolate its possessor; people run away from him out of pure hatred, and say all manner of bad things about him by way of justifying their actions.
By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone a meaning is required.
When people are overcome by rage, it is good to observe attentively the effects on those who deliver themselves up to this emotion.
The best and most beautiful things cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else’s life? His sanctity will never be yours. You must have the humility to work out your own salvation in a darkness where you are absolutely alone…
For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one’s own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed.
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
The notion that we are not awake, that we are not at a level of consciousness where we can understand anything rightly, and where it is impossible to know or have anything real, and where we cannot be in control of ourselves because we are not conscious at the point where control would be possible — is found throughout Platonic, Christian and many other teachings. But consider how difficult — how impossible — it is for us to admit that we are asleep in life. It cannot be an admission. It can only be a gradual realization. And such an experience can only be brought about by the influences of efforts and ideas belonging to the nearly-lost science of awakening. The translators of the gospel could not have properly understood this idea for they translated the Greek “ypnyopew” as “watch” (“Watch, therefore, and pray,” etc.). And this word “watch” is found in many places in the New Testament, but its real meaning is to be “awake.” And the force of this meaning is incalculably greater than that expressed by the term “watch.”
I never think upon eternity without receiving great comfort. For I say to myself, “How could my soul grasp the idea of everylastingness, if the two were not related in some way?”
Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.
Reality is simply the loss of ego. Destroy the ego by seeking its identity. Because the ego is no entity it will automatically vanish and reality will shine forth by itself.
There is no one who hinders you from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which you are a part.
The partial becomes whole, the crooked becomes straight, the empty becomes full, the worn out becomes new.
It is only when everything, even love fails that with a flash, man finds out how vain, how dream-like is this world. Then he catches a glimpse of the beyond. It is only by giving up this world that the other comes, never through holding on to this one.
What a light is here for those that can bear or love the light!
The only elevation of a human being consists in the exercise, growth, energy of the higher principles and powers of his soul. A bird may be shot upwards to the skies by a foreign force; but it rises, in the true sense of the word, only when it spreads its own wings and soars by its own living power.
His eyes can read men’s inmost hearts, and all the art of hypocrites cannot decide him. His sharp discernment sees things clear and true.
That we may merge into the deep and dazzling darkness, vanish into it, dissolve in it forever in an unbelievable bliss beyond imagination, for absolute nothingness represents absolute bliss.
